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district probable?—and there he began to cough, and spat blood
until he died.
"I do not suppose there is any one living now who has seen her.
There has seldom been more than one in a generation, and never in
my life will there be both a man and a woman from whom that child
can be born, who will fetch up the Siren from the sea, and destroy
silence, and save the world!"
"Save the world?" I cried. "Did the prophecy end like that?"
He leaned back against the rock, breathing deep. Through all the
blue-green reflections I saw him colour. I heard him say: "Silence
and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a
thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it
and sing." I would have asked him more, but at that moment the
whole cave darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance
the returning boat.
II
Miss Raby's first novel, "The Eternal Moment," was written round the
idea that man does not live by time alone, that an evening gone may
become like a thousand ages in the courts of heaven—the idea that
was afterwards expounded more philosophically by Maeterlinck. She
herself now declared that it was a tiresome, affected book, and that
the title suggested the dentist's chair. But she had written it when
she was feeling young and happy; and that, rather than maturity, is
the hour in which to formulate a creed. As years pass, the
conception may become more solid, but the desire and the power to
impart it to others are alike weakened. It did not altogether displease
her that her earliest work had been her most ambitious.
By a strange fate, the book made a great sensation, especially in
unimaginative circles. Idle people interpreted it to mean that there
was no harm in wasting time, vulgar people that there was no harm
in being fickle, pious people interpreted it as an attack upon morality.
The authoress became well known in society, where her enthusiasm
for the lower classes only lent her an additional charm. That very
year Lady Anstey, Mrs. Heriot, the Marquis of Bamburgh, and many
others, penetrated to Vorta, where the scene of the book was laid.
They returned enthusiastic. Lady Anstey exhibited her water-colour
drawings; Mrs. Heriot, who photographed, wrote an article in The
Strand; while The Nineteenth Century published a long description of
the place by the Marquis of Bamburgh, entitled "The Modern
Peasant, and his Relations with Roman Catholicism."
Thanks to these efforts, Vorta became a rising place, and people
who liked being off the beaten track went there, and pointed out the
way to others. Miss Raby, by a series of trivial accidents, had never
returned to the village whose rise was so intimately connected with
her own. She had heard from time to time of its progress. It had also
been whispered that an inferior class of tourist was finding it out,
and, fearing to find something spoilt, she had at last a certain
diffidence in returning to scenes which once had given her so much
pleasure. Colonel Leyland persuaded her; he wanted a cool healthy
spot for the summer, where he could read and talk and find walks
suitable for an athletic invalid. Their friends laughed; their
acquaintances gossiped; their relatives were furious. But he was
courageous and she was indifferent. They had accomplished the
expedition under the scanty ægis of Elizabeth.
Her arrival was saddening. It displeased her to see the great hotels
in a great circle, standing away from the village where all life should
have centred. Their illuminated titles, branded on the tranquil
evening slopes, still danced in her eyes. And the monstrous Hôtel
des Alpes haunted her like a nightmare. In her dreams she recalled
the portico, the ostentatious lounge, the polished walnut bureau, the
vast rack for the bedroom keys, the panoramic bedroom crockery,
the uniforms of the officials, and the smell of smart people—which is
to some nostrils quite as depressing as the smell of poor ones. She
was not enthusiastic over the progress of civilisation, knowing by
Eastern experiences that civilisation rarely puts her best foot
foremost, and is apt to make the barbarians immoral and vicious
before her compensating qualities arrive. And here there was no
question of progress: the world had more to learn from the village
than the village from the world.
At the Biscione, indeed, she had found little change—only the pathos
of a survival. The old landlord had died, and the old landlady was ill
in bed, but the antique spirit had not yet departed. On the timbered
front was still painted the dragon swallowing the child—the arms of
the Milanese Visconti, from whom the Cantùs might well be
descended. For there was something about the little hotel which
compelled a sympathetic guest to believe, for the time at all events,
in aristocracy. The great manner, only to be obtained without effort,
ruled throughout. In each bedroom were three or four beautiful things
—a little piece of silk tapestry, a fragment of rococo carving, some
blue tiles, framed and hung upon the whitewashed wall. There were
pictures in the sitting-rooms and on the stairs—eighteenth-century
pictures in the style of Carlo Dolce and the Caracci—a blue-robed
Mater Dolorosa, a fluttering saint, a magnanimous Alexander with a
receding chin. A debased style—so the superior person and the
textbooks say. Yet, at times, it may have more freshness and
significance than a newly-purchased Fra Angelico. Miss Raby, who
had visited dukes in their residences without a perceptible tremor,
felt herself blatant and modern when she entered the Albergo
Biscione. The most trivial things—the sofa cushions, the table cloths,
the cases for the pillows—though they might be made of poor
materials and be æsthetically incorrect, inspired her with reverence
and humility. Through this cleanly, gracious dwelling there had once
moved Signor Cantù with his china-bowled pipe, Signora Cantù in
her snuff-coloured shawl, and Bartolommeo Cantù, now proprietor of
the Grand Hôtel des Alpes.
She sat down to breakfast next morning in a mood which she tried to
attribute to her bad night and her increasing age. Never, she thought,
had she seen people more unattractive and more unworthy than her
fellow-guests. A black-browed woman was holding forth on
patriotism and the duty of English tourists to present an undivided
front to foreign nations. Another woman kept up a feeble lament, like
a dribbling tap which never gathers flow yet never quite ceases,
complaining of the food, the charges, the noise, the clouds, the dust.
She liked coming here herself, she said; but she hardly liked to
recommend it to her friends: it was the kind of hotel one felt like that
about. Males were rare, and in great demand; a young one was
describing, amid fits of laughter, the steps he had taken to astonish
the natives.
Miss Raby was sitting opposite the famous fresco, which formed the
only decoration of the room. It had been discovered during some
repairs; and, though the surface had been injured in places, the
colours were still bright. Signora Cantù attributed it now to Titian,
now to Giotto, and declared that no one could interpret its meaning;
professors and artists had puzzled themselves in vain. This she said
because it pleased her to say it; the meaning was perfectly clear,
and had been frequently explained to her. Those four figures were
sibyls, holding prophecies of the Nativity. It was uncertain for what
original reason they had been painted high up in the mountains, at
the extreme boundary of Italian art. Now, at all events, they were an
invaluable source of conversation; and many an acquaintance had
been opened, and argument averted, by their timely presence on the
wall.
"Aren't those saints cunning!" said an American lady, following Miss
Raby's glance.
The lady's father muttered something about superstition. They were
a lugubrious couple, lately returned from the Holy Land, where they
had been cheated shamefully, and their attitude towards religion had
suffered in consequence.
Miss Raby said, rather sharply, that the saints were sibyls.
"But I don't recall sibyls," said the lady, "either in the N.T. or the O."
"Inventions of the priests to deceive the peasantry," said the father
sadly. "Same as their churches; tinsel pretending to be gold, cotton
pretending to be silk, stucco pretending to be marble; same as their
processions, same as their—(he swore)—campaniles."
"My father," said the lady, bending forward, "he does suffer so from
insomnia. Fancy a bell every morning at six!"
"Yes, ma'am; you profit. We've stopped it."
"Stopped the early bell ringing?" cried Miss Raby.
People looked up to see who she was. Some one whispered that
she wrote.
He replied that he had come up all these feet for rest, and that if he
did not get it he would move on to another centre. The English and
American visitors had co-operated, and forced the hotel-keepers to
take action. Now the priests rang a dinner bell, which was endurable.
He believed that "corperation" would do anything: it had been the
same with the peasants.
"How did the tourists interfere with the peasants?" asked Miss Raby,
getting very hot, and trembling all over.
"We said the same; we had come for rest, and we would have it.
Every week they got drunk and sang till two. Is that a proper way to
go on, anyhow?"
"I remember," said Miss Raby, "that some of them did get drunk. But
I also remember how they sang."
"Quite so. Till two," he retorted.
They parted in mutual irritation. She left him holding forth on the
necessity of a new universal religion of the open air. Over his head
stood the four sibyls, gracious for all their clumsiness and crudity,
each proffering a tablet inscribed with concise promise of
redemption. If the old religions had indeed become insufficient for
humanity, it did not seem probable that an adequate substitute would
be produced in America.
It was too early to pay her promised visit to Signora Cantù. Nor was
Elizabeth, who had been rude overnight and was now tiresomely
penitent, a possible companion. There were a few tables outside the
inn, at which some women sat, drinking beer. Pollarded chestnuts
shaded them; and a low wooden balustrade fenced them off from the
village street. On this balustrade Miss Raby perched, for it gave her
a view of the campanile. A critical eye could discover plenty of faults
in its architecture. But she looked at it all with increasing pleasure, in
which was mingled a certain gratitude.
The German waitress came out and suggested very civilly that she
should find a more comfortable seat. This was the place where the
lower classes ate; would she not go to the drawing-room?
"Thank you, no; for how many years have you classified your guests
according to their birth?"
"For many years. It was necessary," replied the admirable woman.
She returned to the house full of meat and common sense, one of
the many signs that the Teuton was gaining on the Latin in this
debatable valley.
A grey-haired lady came out next, shading her eyes from the sun,
and crackling The Morning Post. She glanced at Miss Raby
pleasantly, blew her nose, apologized for speaking, and spoke as
follows:
"This evening, I wonder if you know, there is a concert in aid of the
stained-glass window for the English Church. Might I persuade you
to take tickets? As has been said, it is so important that English
people should have a rallying point, is it not?"
"Most important," said Miss Raby; "but I wish the rallying point could
be in England."
The grey-haired lady smiled. Then she looked puzzled. Then she
realized that she had been insulted, and, crackling The Morning
Post, departed.
"I have been rude," thought Miss Raby dejectedly. "Rude to a lady as
silly and as grey-haired as myself. This is not a day on which I ought
to talk to people."
Her life had been successful, and on the whole happy. She was
unaccustomed to that mood, which is termed depressed, but which
certainly gives visions of wider, if greyer, horizons. That morning her
outlook altered. She walked through the village, scarcely noticing the
mountains by which it was still surrounded, or the unaltered radiance
of its sun. But she was fully conscious of something new; of the
indefinable corruption which is produced by the passage of a large
number of people.
Even at that time the air was heavy with meat and drink, to which
were added dust and tobacco smoke and the smell of tired horses.
Carriages were huddled against the church, and underneath the
campanile a woman was guarding a stack of bicycles. The season
had been bad for climbing; and groups of young men in smart
Norfolk suits were idling up and down, waiting to be hired as guides.
Two large inexpensive hotels stood opposite the post office; and in
front of them innumerable little tables surged out into the street.
Here, from an early hour in the morning, eating had gone on, and
would continue till a late hour at night. The customers, chiefly
German, refreshed themselves with cries and with laughter, passing
their arms round the waists of their wives. Then, rising heavily, they
departed in single file towards some view-point, whereon a red flag
indicated the possibility of another meal. The whole population was
employed, even down to the little girls, who worried the guests to buy
picture postcards and edelweiss. Vorta had taken to the tourist trade.
A village must have some trade; and this village had always been full
of virility and power. Obscure and happy, its splendid energies had
found employment in wresting a livelihood out of the earth, whence
had come a certain dignity, and kindliness, and love for other men.
Civilisation did not relax these energies, but it had diverted them;
and all the precious qualities, which might have helped to heal the
world, had been destroyed. The family affection, the affection for the
commune, the sane pastoral virtues—all had perished while the
campanile which was to embody them was being built. No villain had
done this thing: it was the work of ladies and gentlemen who were
good and rich and often clever—who, if they thought about the
matter at all, thought that they were conferring a benefit, moral as
well as commercial, on any place in which they chose to stop.
Never before had Miss Raby been conscious of such universal
misdoing. She returned to the Biscione shattered and exhausted,
remembering that terrible text in which there is much semblance of
justice: "But woe to him through whom the offence cometh."
Signora Cantù, somewhat over-excited, was lying in a dark room on
the ground floor. The walls were bare; for all the beautiful things
were in the rooms of her guests whom she loved as a good queen
might love her subjects—and the walls were dirty also, for this was
Signora Cantù's own room. But no palace had so fair a ceiling; for
from the wooden beams were suspended a whole dowry of copper
vessels—pails, cauldrons, water pots, of every colour from lustrous
black to the palest pink. It pleased the old lady to look up at these
tokens of prosperity. An American lady had lately departed without
them, more puzzled than angry.
The two women had little in common; for Signora Cantù was an
inflexible aristocrat. Had she been a great lady of the great century,
she would have gone speedily to the guillotine, and Miss Raby would
have howled approval. Now, with her scanty hair in curl-papers, and
the snuff-coloured shawl spread over her, she entertained the
distinguished authoress with accounts of other distinguished people
who had stopped, and might again stop, at the Biscione. At first her
tone was dignified. But before long she proceeded to village news,
and a certain bitterness began to show itself. She chronicled deaths
with a kind of melancholy pride. Being old herself, she liked to
meditate on the fairness of Fate, which had not spared her
contemporaries, and often had not spared her juniors. Miss Raby
was unaccustomed to extract such consolation. She too was growing
old, but it would have pleased her better if others could have
remained young. She remembered few of these people well, but
deaths were symbolical, just as the death of a flower may symbolize
the passing of all the spring.
Signora Cantù then went on to her own misfortunes, beginning with
an account of a landslip, which had destroyed her little farm. A
landslip, in that valley, never hurried. Under the green coat of turf
water would collect, just as an abscess is formed under the skin.
There would be a lump on the sloping meadow, then the lump would
break and discharge a slowly-moving stream of mud and stones.
Then the whole area seemed to be corrupted; on every side the
grass cracked and doubled into fantastic creases, the trees grew
awry, the barns and cottages collapsed, all the beauty turned
gradually to indistinguishable pulp, which slid downwards till it was
washed away by some stream.
From the farm they proceeded to other grievances, over which Miss
Raby became almost too depressed to sympathize. It was a bad
season; the guests did not understand the ways of the hotel; the
servants did not understand the guests; she was told she ought to
have a concierge. But what was the good of a concierge?
"I have no idea," said Miss Raby, feeling that no concierge would
ever restore the fortunes of the Biscione.
"They say he would meet the diligence and entrap the new arrivals.
What pleasure should I have from guests I entrapped?"
"The other hotels do it," said Miss Raby, sadly.
"Exactly. Every day a man comes down from the Alpes."
There was an awkward silence. Hitherto they had avoided
mentioning that name.
"He takes them all," she continued, in a burst of passion. "My son
takes all my guests. He has taken all the English nobility, and the
best Americans, and all my old Milanese friends. He slanders me up
and down the valley, saying that the drains are bad. The hotel-
keepers will not recommend me; they send on their guests to him,
because he pays them five per cent. for every one they send. He
pays the drivers, he pays the porters, he pays the guides. He pays
the band, so that it hardly ever plays down in the village. He even